iPad games

I did the character designs and some of the animation for the Transamerica Retirement Services Stash and Dash game which is now available in the Apple App Store for free. You can also play it on Facebook. It’s a savings game where the little piggy bank has to gather falling coins and stay away from the trolls who take away your savings.

Fun for everyone, especially if you can avoid focusing on the savings for retirement portion of the game…Savings for retirement? What does that mean?

EDIT. March, 19.

Some folks have asked me what I meant by the last line of this post. For a lot of people who work for a company, full-time, they don’t realize that for us freelancers, we don’t really have much in retirement options. So I don’t have a retirement plan. No one matches anything and I get to pay my full SS, no employer pays half for me. I spent the better part of my professional life working for large companies. I had retirement plans. I paid into various things and the companies matched to some degree. But once you are freelancing, it’s a different world. I suspect a lot of people working for companies full-time don’t realize this. So, what I meant was, quite truthfully, I don’t have retirement savings. I figure with my diet, I won’t make 60 anyway. Pass the sour cream please.

 

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Animation Thursday

This was passed on to me a few folks now, and thanks to them all! It’s a great find.

Based on the beautiful book by Oliver Jeffers this animated short looks amazing. The character design, the modeling and lighting. Amazing. When I see stuff that looks this original and has a story that is as rich and simple (yeah, rich and simple in the same sentence) as Oliver’s book,  it gives me hope for what will be unleashed as smaller companies and individuals produce work outside the studio system.

Animated features have become less than enthralling once again. For the most part animated films have become huge, summer studio releases which must pander to the broadest audience and always the lowest common denominator to make back the 150 million that it costs to ‘produce’ one. The exceptions stand out, and Pixar almost always swims above all the others, but Cars started to smell a bit ripe by the end.

Check out the samples on this page. Studio aka’s short – Lost and Found.

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UCLA Animation Workshop

A few years back I was a graduate student at UCLA in the MFA Animation program. I did an interview with Chris Sanders (Dir. Lilo and Stitch) for the UCLA Animation Workshop student magazine called Animatrix. A great collection of research, articles and interviews.This is the issue my interview appeared in.

If you are interested in animation it’s worth checking out some of the issues. I think they are about $9.00 each and help support the graduate animation program at UCLA. Or something like that. They contain some good info. that might be hard to otherwise track down.

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Hans Bacher – Blog

I am adding a link to this blog and I recommend everyone interested in animation art/backgrounds/production design and art direction for film check it out. This is a terrific site. It’s put together by a marvelous artist named Hans Bacher. I own his book, Dream Worlds and it is filled with great Dev. art and samples from his career. When I need color inspiration it’s one of the first places I look. His blog is much like his book for me. It’s inspiring and depressing. How so? Well, there’s so much amazing work that if I look too much all I do is beat myself up for not being as good.

Anyway the site features tons of great links (days and days worth of links to follow) and inspiring work from Hans and many other of the finest animation artists who ever worked.

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animation background for new short, Hugh

For the past three years I have slowly (an understatement) been working on a new animated short. I have so little free time that I’m starting to wonder if it will ever get done. I feel confident on the story, the art direction and the design and character design seem to be working.

This is the opening BG for the short. It’s a huge background and we slowly truck to the top of the plateau where we meet our main character, Hugh. This is of course, a greatly reduced version. It was drawn with pencil, but finished digitally in Photoshop and composited in After Effects.

I’ll try and post more of it in progress, but judging by my schedule It’ll take me a year to get the first few scenes animated.

And a close up of said background. That’s a tree, not the main character (but the tree does play a role in the story)

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Animation Monday – Disney

The Old Mill. The Academy Award winning cartoon by Disney from 1937(?) It features the multiplane camera in all it’s 3D glory. An amazing short for it’s time and it still looks beautiful today. They were experimenting with just about every natural effect, water/rain, wind, lighting effects, tons of effects animation. It’s an observational story, that is very simple, quiet and emotional. It reminds me, in pacing, of the train scene in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Contemplative and full of little insights. I remember the frogs and the fireflies from some point when I was a kid. Maybe saw it in school? And as some comment at YouTube, I remember being scared as well. They used to show some of these old Disney cartoons in school on days like Halloween or half-days. They wheeled in the 16mm projector and that usually meant a good day.

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Animation Monday, Naked Rabbit

Some great animated shorts here as well as several well done short live action films. I really love Violent Combat Robots. It’s no different then 99.9% of kids action cartoons. I’m not sure what the remaining .1% is actually…

The site belongs to Tim Maloney of Naked Rabbit Films. Hours of fun. Or at least minutes of laughing. Seconds of wetting ones pants. Something like that.

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Animation Monday, Canada

An inspired short from Canada. You Tube gives us a chance to see so much. When you consider that even with cable TV, you get material that is for the most part, complient with a bigger agenda (improve ratings against such-and-such network) or it has to be family oriented, or it’s material an agent can force onto a network or development executive, or something that advertisers will dig, or something that can appeal to adults, but has to be FUN!. FUN!, FUNNNN! for kids (ugh, can you say current TV animated cable stations?).

I wish there was an easy way to donate a $1.00 if you really enjoyed a short. Without going to Paypall or some other flakey outside pay service.

I don’t know anything more about it than is written at You Tube. Funky, dark story.

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Animation Monday, Mary and her Little Lamb

I finally finished this animated short-short. It took me forever.I think I had the sound track done a year ago. Just been too busy to get all the pieces together. As with every project, I think it could be better, but at some point I need to execute it and move on. I’d like to have had time to animate the ‘army’ I wanted to spread across the battle field, but I never got it working the way I wanted. Overall the style hangs together. Anyway, here it is. The big budget, Hollywood action film version of your favorite nursery rhyme – Mary Had a Little Lamb.

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The Thing with No Head

Yeah, I’m writing about that animated short again. Looks like it will be playing a few new festivals this year, so I dug out the old website and reposted it.

For those of you who need to know, the Thing with No Head is an animated short I made when enrolled at UCLA. I have been reworking it as a children’s picture book, which is almost ready to go out to a few editors.

Here’s a pencil test from it I posted on YouTube a while back.

The short was animated traditionally, but I did the backgrounds in Photoshop. Shot the thing on 16mm. Later I transfered it to the computer.

Anyway, here is the site, and a short trailer on the festivals page.

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